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Dropbox Paper mobile App Discontinuation
- incubo4u 1y agoOh no, anyway
- plasticsoprano 1y agoGood. That app was horrible. I'd get a notification of a comment and 90% of the time it wouldn't load the comment, so I'd have to scroll to the bottom where the comments were and I couldn't tell what the comment related to so I'd reload the link and hope for the it to properly highlight the text and show the comment and that would work maybe 40% of the time. Editing text was frustrating as well. If they provide a better web experience I'm all for this.
- reilly3000 1y agoDoes it support mobile web? Why are they killing the app?
- hiroshi3110 1y ago>Why are they killing the app? Cutting the maintenance cost I guess.
- plasticsoprano 1y agoThat app hasn't been touched in years. I doubt the cost was that high.
- xeromal 1y agoApp stores have been getting more annoying every year with new requirements for apps that aren't even updated. I just archived 3 apps I've built for people over the years but hosted for free but now the juice isn't worth the squeeze.
- rjh29 1y agoSo far this year they've discontinued Paper (app), Passwords, Send and Track, Vault and Capture. Incredibly, Vault was discontinued by automatically turning PIN-protected folders into regular unprotected ones! Would be stupid to rely on them for anything other than basic file storage at this point.
- privatelypublic 1y agoWhy rely on them at all? Dollar per GB they cost more than literally any other solution with file storage.
- bayindirh 1y agoBecause they provide nice features on top of basic file storage. If you use them, they justify the cost. If you don't need them, there's always pCloud.
- scarface_74 1y agoWith either Google or Microsoft, you get a complete office suite for the same price including storage
- derefr 1y agoRight, and that's what Dropbox Paper was probably originally an attempt at working toward, from the opposite direction — "We have Google Drive, now we just need Google Docs." It should be obvious that "a whole collaborative office suite" is not the kind of thing a regular company can build as an extension play... but somehow some manager inside Dropbox convinced them that direction was possible. At least for a while. Seems they've gradually come to their senses.
- bayindirh 1y agoFor various reasons, I have all three of them. There are some missing things in Google and Microsoft's offerings. Namely: 1. App integration (3rd parties can access to a single folder in your Dropbox, allowing "purchase to Dropbox" directly. Many merchants automatically update the files if they receive updates, too. 2. Auto OCR, incl. handwriting. My old comics which are not English are OCRd, and I can do full-text search inside them, which is very useful for me. 3. Fast, auto transcription in many languages. I needed a transcription of a file recently. All services needed memberships, etc. I did it from Google cloud API toolbox. However when I uploaded the the same file to Dropbox, I saw a transcription button. It produced equally good results in way less time. 4. Send-a-copy (aka Transfer). I don't want to share and try to remember to disable links. My Dropbox membership contains a complete "WeTransfer" replacement, and I use it a lot. 5. Request files. I open a link, people send in the files I need, then the "dropbox" closes automatically. I get notifications for uploads, too. 6. Funnily, a working Linux client. ...and possibly more I don't use or can't remember right now.
- gkoberger 1y agoWhat Dropbox has been doing to Paper has been so sad to me. I've been a daily user for almost a decade (and Hackpad before that), and their recent move into combining it into Dropbox itself has caused me to almost completely stop. I get what they're doing... unifying everything into one system. I get it. But I can't find any of my docs anymore. When I go to paper.dropbox.com, where there use to be thousands of docs, there's now nothing. The app wasn't great, but it was better than nothing.
- plasticsoprano 1y agoafter they combined paper I got a new folder called Paper docs in my account which had all of my paper docs I'd normally see on paper.dropbox.com. Did you not get that folder?
- gkoberger 1y agoI have it but most of my docs aren’t in it. They can only be accessed via direct link. The folder is also not accessible from paper.dropbox.com on mobile, which is more important now that the app is gone. I wrote to support and they told me there’s nothing they can do. (And even if the docs were in it… now I’m a few clicks away from my docs which is way worse than before.)
- system2 1y agoHN saw the birth of Dropbox; I hope we don't see the death of it here.
- CamperBob2 1y agoMeh, they can shut it down simply by taking it private and arranging a sale to private equity, then loading it up with debt and stripping the assets. I don't see the big deal.
- patapong 1y agoI am a big fan of dropbox and pay for their premium subscription, but I am sometimes a bit confused as to the direction they are taking. They still have the best sync engine and conceptual simplicity in my opinion, but since "File Request", none of their features have been useful for me, and mostly seem to have made the app more bloated. I am also sad at them shutting down the photo features, which I used. I would love for them to implement: - The ability to exclude folders from syncing - useful for .venv etc - The ability to sync folders outside of the dropbox folder - Instant hosting by sharing a link pointing to a folder with an index.html
- plasticsoprano 1y agoAccording to this post a dropbox employee made on the dropbox subreddit, excluding things from syncing may be coming soon https://www.reddit.com/r/dropbox/comments/1mc86hi/cut_the_clutter_test_ignore_files_feature_sign_up/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dropbox/comments/1mc86hi/cut_the_cl...
- jez 1y agoIf you’re open to third-party sync clients, Maestral supports this: https://maestral.app/docs/mignore https://maestral.app/docs/mignore I’ve been loving Maestral so far, it’s just the syncing, none of the other stuff. It has some downsides (it can’t upload symlinks but it can download them, and it doesn’t have LAN sync) but it’s super lightweight.
- artdigital 1y agoAFAIK Maestral doesn’t have block level diff and sync which is the main reason (for me) to use Dropbox: their superior sync engine I have Maestral (and rclone) running on my raspbi but wouldn’t use it for things like sparsebundle syncing
- smileybarry 1y ago> They still have the best sync engine[...] If you mean differential sync (or "delta sync"), Google Drive added it this year and OneDrive added it a few years ago. Google Drive's client is much worse than Dropbox's, though, with it just randomly breaking on Windows often. I've had good experiences with OneDrive on Windows & macOS, though.
- tibbydudeza 1y agoSteve nailed it when he said - you are just a feature.
- imagetic 1y agoThe video review and transcription tools have been game changing for us.
- ianstormtaylor 1y agoThe way Dropbox has mismanaged Paper over the past decade, and squandered so many opportunities in the productivity tools space, has been one of the most frustrating things to watch. Dropbox bought Hackpad and launched Dropbox Paper a decade ago! Paper was awesome at launch — so much less friction than Google Docs for teams back then — and had a good internal product team behind it, but leadership failed to see the potential. I think it's because the Dropbox founders were so consumer-focused that they couldn't envision how huge Paper could be in the productivity tools space. They kept framing it as an Evernote competitor, instead of seeing it turning into something like Notion. Even when they finally seemed to understand that Dropbox was never going to be a B2C sensation, they kept acquiring "side product" businesses instead of ones that built on Dropbox's existing value. (To their credit, this was the zeitgeist back when they started — B2B was not cool at all, and the sort of B2C/B hybrid that exists now wasn't a thing.) Meanwhile startups like Notion actually saw the opportunity and blossomed. And nowadays, even super-slow Google is releasing features like pageless mode, markdown support, etc. Such that Paper is almost irrelevant at this point, despite having had such a massive head start. It's sad because I can easily imagine an alternate future where Dropbox understood what Paper could be, and invested in it alongside things like an Airtable competitor, to create a truly viable, and forward-looking alternative to Google Docs/Sheets/Drive, without all the baggage of being a Microsoft Office clone.
- Hovertruck 1y agoYeah, Dropbox Paper remains the best pure writing experience I've ever used at work. I think Notion has a lot of nice features, but just writing in it still feels more cumbersome than Paper did a decade ago.
- ianstormtaylor 1y agoI completely agree. Paper was so frictionless that you could actually use it as a tool to think and sketch ideas with. Instead of Notion which feels clunky just to type in.
- varenc 1y agoRIP Paper
- tinyhouse 1y agoI'm a fan of Dropbox but their leadership is lacking to say the least... I recall on one earnings call Drew mentioned they launched Passwords. I checked it out and was shocked how completely broken and unusable it was. Never used it again and eventually it was discontinued. The new thing they are pushing is Dash, their universal search. It makes a lot of sense, but their progress is very slow and I'm not sure they are able to compete, even though they have some distribution advantage. The one thing that seems to be working for them is being lean and more efficient. In the last few years they laid off people and improved their margins and cash flows. They couldn't innovate their product so went the other way of let's just squeeze as much money from what we already have.
- lyime 1y agonotion ate there lunch
- micromacrofoot 1y agonotion will eventually suffer the same fate, they all do...
- jitl 1y agoNotions been profitable every year I’ve worked there so we at least seem to have a business
- micromacrofoot 1y agothe real test of leadership is what happens when the line plateaus, very few accept the ceiling
- jitl 1y agomoar ai, probably
- pradn 1y agoThey have a super fast and slick file storage app. Some of the features that are natural additions to that feature set work quite well, like document scanning. But so much of what Dropbox does seems like they can't stay put and be happy with their core offering. Of course, they have to do this to increase revenue, for fear of becoming a mere commodity. It's tough.
- marton_s 1y agoI’m a long time Dropbox user and had no idea what Paper is (it’s a collaborative document editing thing). I can’t recall ever seeing it as part of the Dropbox brand or anyone using it. I might have even been interested in using it… Is this just me or did they really fail to market this product big time?
- aborsy 1y agoDropbox is example of a bad company. Why Dropbox doesn’t offer features adjacent to sync, like: end to end encryption for consumers, backup solutions like backblaze, S3-like buckets, controls like with S3 (like those related to IAM), tools to monitor folders and see analytics, flexible storage plans, equivalent of the Firefox/Bitwarden send, equivalent of services like ProtonDrive, and stop locking down ordinary features behind additional payment wall (even in paid plans, like using your available storage with more than one user for security and for defining scope for each device). My Dropbox Plus $120/year offers a fraction of what my managed nextcloud provides. If you pay Dropbox 10$/month, you can’t set a damn password or expiry date to the file that you share. You have to pay even more for this simple feature. Their password manager is limited to 50 passwords in their free plan. What these people are thinking?
- margalabargala 1y agoNot only that, but also for a Linux user, you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially by getting an FTP account, mounting it locally with curlftpfs, and then using SVN or CVS on the mounted filesystem. They won't last.
- blibble 1y agothe company lost $500 million last year, it's possible that comment might still be correct
- AlexeyBelov 1y ago90% of people misunderstand that comment entirely. It was about the value proposition of Dropbox as of early 2007 (and also about the specific announcement!) and their long-term profitability, if anything.
- s09dfhks 1y agoI got that reference. Don’t worry king
- xdfgh1112 1y ago
- petetnt 1y agoDropbox Paper was the best Notepad-like app in the market, only to Dropbox to completely stop developing it almost immediately and then eventually making it worse by making it Dropbox-backed and now killing the app. It's a shame really.
- mvdtnz 1y agoI for one am very happy if this marks the start of the downfall of the mobile app. They were a neat concept but ruined by the gatekeepers, and the web has evolved to the point where most are unnecessary.
- kepano 1y agoIt's so strange that a company designed around syncing files created the .paper format which only stores a URL, and no actual content. It could have been a great Markdown client.
- h1fra 1y agoFirst password, now paper, what's going on at Dropbox?
- REPLicated2 1y agoI always liked the file syncing part of Dropbox, and was considering their Family plan a few years back, until they increased the prices. If I remember correctly, their reasoning included all the additional features like Paper which you would get but that I never needed. It's currently at 203 EUR/year here - pretty steep if you only care about the core usecase of syncing files.
- xp84 1y agoI'm continually impressed that Dropbox continues to exist, so long after their primary product offering was so thoroughly sherlocked by the big two B2C companies (Google and Apple) and the big two B2B companies (MS and Google). Especially because I've never worked anywhere that used Dropbox, so they don't have the long-tail life support legacy B2B money keeping them afloat like say, Lotus Notes did. B2C was lost to them the minute Google Drive and iCloud Drive both got decent enough. Clearly with all their random acquisitions and stuff they were trying to become a #3 to MS and Google for corporate, but it's such a moat to penetrate, since they'd have to become at least a little better than at least one of them at most of the big productivity things (email, calendar, documents & drive, chat, meetings), or be a lot better at one specific thing, enough that businesses will have an appetite to keep paying for GOOG/MS's bundles and add-on additional cost to pay for Dropbox too. If I had to vote for a company least likely to succeed I'd pick Dropbox, and that's without any shade to the people running it. They're just in a terrible market position.
- bithavoc 1y agoagree, also I believe box.com was smaller than Dropbox and it seems like they’re still alive, it’s crazy to me.
- everfrustrated 1y agoFurthermore, they're both public listed companies.
- rkagerer 1y agoGood. I wish they'd stop adding new "apps" I don't want, and focus on being a handy little file sync and sharing solution. Some of my own pet peeves they did: - got rid of Public folder support, in spite of user outcry (https://www.dropboxforum.com/discussions/101001014/ending-support-of-public-folder/197906/replies/198069 https://www.dropboxforum.com/discussions/101001014/ending-su...) - re-wrote the software in such a way that files are temporarily locked right after they get written / modified (intermittently breaking utilities like VSO Image Resizer) - made it increasingly difficult or impossible to deliberately remove the green checkmark overlay icons (used to be an easy Windows registry hack, now the software goes through all kinds of hoops to fight you and restore the way they want it) - IIRC for a while they introduced AI feature default settings that would hoover up your document contents without consent (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/12/dropbox-spooks-users-by-sending-data-to-openai-for-ai-search-features/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/12/dropb...)
- 1a527dd5 1y agoMan, I really wish they would focus on their primary storage offering. I _love_ Dropbox and have introduced many many friends and family to it. That is testament how good and easy their storage offering is to use. This is where I've previously failed to convince the same group of people to use Google Drive / OneDrive.
- faramarz 1y agoWell, saw that coming and too bad because for a moment and before notion took off, it had a chance. I gave up using it when critical notes I wrote in offline mode in the subway did not sync as I was lead to believe. Never touched it again.
- techlatest_net 1y ago[dead]
- gcr 1y agoIn 2020, Dropbox launched “new paper,” which turned the flat list of Paper documents on paper.Dropbox.com into literal files that live in your Dropbox folder. This was a staged rollout. Mine wasn’t migrated until five years later. For a while, I could edit “paper files” that other team members created, and I could create paper docs on the old version (to the utter confusion of my team members), but I couldn’t create new paper files without duplicating a team member’s doc and deleting the content. Now when I visit paper.Dropbox.com, all of my “old paper” docs are completely missing and I see an empty list (of what I presume are old-style docs.) :( I have local backups, but like, what’s the point of maintaining two separate services with the same name for five years? Edit: Apparently my account was migrated in December 2024. I don’t know why the old interface is still accessible to me. A redirect or a message like “Check your ‘Migrated Paper Docs’ folder” would go a long way instead of showing an hauntingly empty list. (I’m a very early user, signed up before 2008, have 3TB of free lifetime storage from referrals and internship bonuses)
- challenger-derp 1y ago> (I’m a very early user, signed up before 2008, have 3TB of free lifetime storage from referrals and internship bonuses) I thought I had it lucky with my measly 25GB of lifetime storage. Have been using Dropbox for free for well over a decade – I would pay but their entry level plan far exceeds what I need.
- nicholasjbs 1y agoWe were among the first Paper users (starting from the private beta). We loved the product for the first few years, but then it stagnated. We finally switched away from it a year and a half ago. Their export feature has been broken for over a year. Support hasn't helped, and our data is still trapped. A sad end for a once promising product.
- brundolf 1y agoI feel like Dropbox has never figured out how to expand beyond folder sync. Which, it's still a fantastic folder-sync client and I'm a very happy customer of that product. But I mostly just have to swat away all the other things that pop up because I don't need them. And folder sync seems like a dying market, as fewer and fewer people work with files on disk
- curtisszmania 1y ago[dead]
- j45 1y agoIt's one thing to discontinue something - is there a reason it's not open sources it for the users that prefer to use it? It's odd that every software must sufficiently be for everyone, or bust.
- tartartar45 1y agoDropbox is the place where cool products go to die.. there are a ton of new products popping up that can replace Paper. I started using Scrap and found it really easy, although their dark mode sucks. https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scrap-notetaking/id6752312339 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/scrap-notetaking/id6752312339